You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human (4 page)

One of the oldest functions of musical IDS was probably to communicate emotional state. IDS exaggerates the features of our own emotional speech, such as high-pitched, fast sounds when we are happy and low-pitched, slow sounds when we are sad. Not only do caregivers use these features of IDS to communicate emotional information to babies, they also use them to modify a baby’s emotional state.
²⁰

In 2002, Laurel Trainor and Renée Desjardins defined another linguistic benefit of IDS. They were interested in the way that IDS exaggerates ‘formant frequencies’ – the frequencies that emerge as a consequence of the way we use our vocal tract to produce different vowel sounds.
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They hypothesised that these special pitch contours in IDS may serve as a clue to the location of vowels in speech and may therefore help babies to learn and discriminate these crucial language sounds.

One of the great pieces of anecdotal evidence that the researchers cited in support of this idea was a study showing that ‘pet directed speech’ contains many of the features of IDS (such as high pitch) but not the IDS focus on vowel differences.
²²
After all, there’s little point in trying to teach your favourite pooch to speak.

Trainor and Desjardins tested 96 babies between the ages of six and seven months and looked at their ability to discriminate between two English vowels, /i/ as in
heed
and /I/ as in
hid
.
²³
The crucial comparison for our interests was between the steady state and pitch contour versions of these sounds, which are equivalent to the sounds made by ADS and IDS respectively.

The method they used to measure the babies’ responses was the ‘conditioned head turn procedure’. This method is based on the premise that once a baby is used to a sound it will then only turn its head if it hears a different sound. Therefore, if the baby turns its head then this is an indication that it is able to discriminate two sounds. In the IDS study, everyone but the baby wore headphones, so there could be no question of adult influence on the baby’s response.

The researchers found that the babies were much better at recognising a change to a vowel when they heard IDS as compared to ADS. They concluded that IDS contains musical features that can help babies to learn about different vowel types long before they are able to make use of this information. Our musical speech may therefore help our young to build the foundations of their language learning.

Musical meaning

You might think that learning about vowels is sophisticated enough for a six-month-old but musical IDS may serve an even higher function in language learning: the ability to communicate the meaning of a message.

As an adult we are blessed with syntax, semantics and prosody (pitch movements, points of focus and rhythm) with which to convey meaning. When trying to communicate with preverbal infants, we are limited to prosody cues so we tend to exaggerate them; hence musical IDS. This allows us to quickly get across basic intention messages such as a
prohibitive gesture (‘No, don’t touch’), approval (‘Aren’t you a clever baby!’), direction (‘Lie down, it’s sleepy time now’) and comfort (‘It’s okay, it’s okay, daddy’s here’).

There is an interesting developmental trajectory to babies’ liking for IDS, which mirrors their mental and physical development over the first year of life. Christine Kitamura and Christa Lam studied three-, six- and ninemonth-old infants and looked at their preferences for IDS that communicated different intentions; whether a mother was attempting to communicate comfort, approval or directive intent.
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They found that babies go through stages of preferring comfort messages when they are youngest, to then responding more to approval, and finally, around nine months, being more attracted to directive communications. The conclusion was that as a baby learns more about language they are more drawn to IDS that has phonetic and instructive content as opposed to simple, repeating sounds.

It’s one thing to show that babies can respond to the meaning and intentions of musical IDS; it’s quite another thing to show that these intentions are actually understood.

Elena Sakkalou and Merideth Gattis studied the effect of prosody on young infants’ (average age sixteen months) ability to distinguish whether an adult action was intentional or accidental.
²⁵
In their experiment, an adult performed two versions of an action, such as dropping a toy, one with intention (‘There’) and one with accidental speech (‘Whoops’). The actor kept a neutral face and posture so the sound of the utterance was the only clue to their intention. It turns out the infants were significantly more likely to respond and copy the intentional action compared to the accidental one, indicating that they had understood the core meaning of the musical IDS.

Taking everything into account, it appears that IDS has
multiple uses, which is no doubt the main reason why it exists all over the world. Although studies of language acquisition in babies are appealing, it’s probably stretching things to claim that IDS is a vital language-learning tool. One argument against this idea is that children will pick up language almost irrespective of how much adults speak to them
²⁶
(except in rare cases of extreme neglect). In my opinion, however, the research presented here supports the idea that the musical features of IDS have an important role to play in our preverbal development.

Verbal development is not the only potential benefit of IDS. In our evolutionary past IDS likely provided a valuable way to stimulate pair-bonding, facilitate behavioural learning and modulate stress responses. IDS also provides adults with an invaluable way to interact with babies in the period before they can speak – when they are at their most physically vulnerable and when it’s most crucial for us to communicate basic intentions and feelings.

In this chapter I wanted to tackle a few urban myths about the idea that only a few of us are really born musical. We have seen that just about every baby is born with the building blocks of musical skills, thanks to the early development of our hearing system and our ability to detect a good proportion of the sound from the outer and inner world. No evidence that I have ever seen has convinced me flooding this early environment with extra music is beneficial.

Babies learn and remember musical patterns that they hear as part of everyday
in utero
life whether we, as adults, consider those sounds to be music or not. These everyday tunes of life trigger happy and relaxed responses after birth, especially the music that newborns have heard most often: their mother’s voice and heartbeat.

Babies’ memories of womb music influence their newborn perception of patterns in sound, drive their interest in melodic patterns, and influence their first attempts at vocalisations. No doubt the musical nature of our newborns is one of the reasons why we developed a musical way to communicate with them in the form of IDS. We don’t yet fully understand why we instinctively speak to our young in this musical way but there’s no doubt that IDS benefits both adults and babies by stimulating early interactions, promoting care-giving, and providing a few early lessons in the nature of complex cognitions like emotion and language.

In the next chapter we move on from babies to consider the musical world of our children. We break a few more urban myths, such as the idea that listening to music (and in particular our friend Mozart) can help make children smarter. We also look at some of the potential developmental benefits of engaging in musical activities and show how the building blocks of musical understanding that we have seen in babies continue to take shape in our children through simple everyday musical exposure.

Chapter 2

Music in childhood

‘Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music’

WILLIAM STAFFORD

Time flies. One minute your little bundle of joy is producing their first babbles, cautiously lifting their head from their blanket and perfecting their gummy smile. Then before you can blink they are mobile and everything must be swiftly babyproofed. You must keep a sharp eye out for their passionate desire to put anything and everything into their mouth. Curious coos become first babbled words and that firm, unyielding grasp reflex evolves into delicate, intentional movements. Booties become shoes and we all emerge triumphant from the potty training trials. The baby is becoming a child.

In this chapter we will look at some of the burning questions that parents encounter when considering the role that music might play in their child’s life. Behind most of these queries is a single, simple, need-to-know: will music improve my child’s life?

One frequently asked version of this question is whether music makes a child smarter. I will start by facing up to that thorny issue. Another related question: what skills will music lessons give my child, other than the ability to sing or play their chosen instrument? Music performance is a valuable ability, but we are talking about investment here. Very few children go on to make their living via music performance
or composition and for the investment it takes to become a professional musician many a parent would hope that you get some side bonuses. We will look at the evidence for such ‘transfer’ benefits.

Then we will dive into music education research to tackle the question of what makes for a successful musical education. What instrument is right for my child? What makes one child press on with their lessons while another loses interest?

Finally, we will consider the impact of music on childhood outside the world of formal training. A child’s world is even more musical than that of your average adult: young children still hear musical IDS, many attend music groups that may or may not teach instruments, and general education often features music as well. Songs are used to teach social etiquette and community values, as well as maths, languages and physical education. On top of this, children’s television is crammed full of music that children seem to love but which often drives adults crazy. How is all this exposure to music impacting on the way our children develop?

Mozart for a smarter child?

In childhood we can begin to assess the question posed in Chapter 1 regarding the effects of music on intelligence. In babies this is almost impossible to measure; IQ tests for babies make little sense given their limited ability to respond. However, once a child begins to reliably communicate their intentions and understanding of the world then we can begin to assess their cognitive strengths.

The question of a link between music and intellect is also important in a practical sense as a child starts to show an active interest in engaging with music: dancing, singing, and playing instruments. At this point parents are likely to think about whether to involve their child in music groups or music lessons, or to invest in a music player for their room. Perhaps
a few Mozart CDs? Hang on … hold that thought. Let’s take a look at the evidence.

A friend recently told me that he has taken to playing Mozart CDs to his young daughter while she is falling asleep in the hope of invoking the ‘Mozart effect’.
¹
He hopes that listening to Mozart’s music will trigger a boost in his child’s intelligence, an idea that has now firmly made its way into pop psychology legend.

In fact, the Mozart effect is often one of the first things people ask me about when I tell them that I’m a music psychologist. It has its own Wikipedia page and a substantial industry has grown up around the idea that playing a certain kind of music has benefits for IQ. A well-balanced glance through the literature, however, reveals that all is not what it seems.

It all started innocently enough in 1993, with a one-page paper in the journal
Nature
by Frances Rauscher and colleagues.
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They conducted an experiment where US college students were played either ten minutes of Mozart’s Sonata for two Pianos in D major (KV448), or listened to relaxation instructions or sat in silence. The researchers then asked the students to complete a test of spatial-temporal reasoning. This type of task (paper-folding, matrices, or pattern analysis) requires you to think in your mind’s eye about shapes and how they might fit together. The researchers found a significantly higher score on the test only after listening to the Mozart piece, which translated to a boost of between eight and nine IQ points.

The researchers went on to replicate their findings but found no similar boost effects after ten minutes of music by Philip Glass, British trance music, relaxation instructions or an audio book.
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The Mozart effect seemed like a very exciting and important finding that might suggest a particular type of music has a positive effect on our ability to think.

How might this effect work? Rauscher and her colleagues
speculated that hearing Mozart’s music might strengthen neural firing in an area of the brain that also supports performance on spatial-temporal tasks.

It all seemed too good to be true: a simple solution (listen to music) to a complex problem (boost mental power). Sure enough, all was not what it appeared.

The first issue is the temporary nature of the effect. To be fair, the original authors stated that the effect only lasts approximately ten minutes so we were never talking about any permanent boost to thinking. The problem is that in wider pop science culture you often lose an important bit of information like this from the original research, which in fact points to a key limitation with the effect.

A second issue with the effect is its specificity. In a subsequent article the original authors suggested that a researcher needed to use exactly their experimental conditions in order to have a hope of getting an effect.
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This limitation suggests that the effect is not a very general one.

On top of all this, more recent studies have shown that you can get a similar boost effect if you play Schubert’s piano music, when people prefer Schubert to Mozart.
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You can also get the boost effect when you read people a bit of Stephen King, if they enjoy his writing.
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Following such results, researchers have proposed that the Mozart effect actually relies on a temporary improvement to our mood and arousal states (how awake we feel),
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which then has a positive effect on our task performance. And you don’t necessarily need Mozart to boost your mood.

The final big issue with the Mozart effect is the failure to replicate. The numbers of studies I know about that have failed to replicate this effect now outweigh those that have worked.
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I even have personal experience of trying to replicate the original paradigm. I followed the recipe of the original study to the letter with high hopes. It didn’t work.

Taking all the evidence from the Mozart effect into account over the years, it is now largely accepted that simple passive (listening) exposure to music does not boost IQ, cognitive function, or reasoning ability in the long term,
⁹
and that any temporary small boosts to task performance are due to a concurrent increase in mood and arousal.
¹⁰

So by all means, buy a child a Mozart CD if they like listening to his music, enjoy twirling and swaying to the sounds, find it relaxing as part of a sleep routine, or perhaps soothing in times of illness. The lesson from the research in this area is that we must not expect a child’s IQ to grow in response to hearing music as if we were feeding fertiliser to a rose.

The Mozart effect story may not meet all the hype and false promise that has surrounded it over the years but it does have a positive ending. Thanks to the exposure of this science story in the media there has been a renewed interest in engaging children with music across the world and several industries have developed that use musical games and activities as part of playgroups and educational settings. As we’ll see later, these alternative forms of active musical engagement (rather than just passive listening), while not as influential as music lessons, can have positive effects on child development.

Music lessons for a smarter child?

Passive listening to music may only ever have temporary effects on our mental processing power but active musical involvement can have long-term effects. To paraphrase Nina Kraus, of whom we will hear more in a moment: you won’t get fit watching sports on TV – you will get fit if you work out.

Let me be blunt to begin with. If performing music made more intelligent human beings then all professional musicians should have consistently higher IQs than similarly educated non-musicians. Put simply, they don’t. Musicians do better on certain tests of cognitive function (more on this in Chapter 4)
but not on general IQ tests. In one study musicians even performed worse.
¹¹

When is anything in life ever that simple? If playing music automatically made us smarter, then scientists would have shouted it from the rooftops long ago. So let’s put that idea aside and get more specific. Maybe an effect of music on IQ is harder to find in adults because so many other things come into play – a lifetime of education and experience in other domains. How about children who take music lessons: do they have higher IQs?

A comprehensive series of studies on the link between music lessons and IQ in children has been conducted by Glenn Schellenberg. In 2004 Schellenberg randomly assigned 144 sixyear-old children from Toronto to one of four groups: keyboard or singing lessons, drama lessons, or a control group who had no extra lessons.
¹²
In order to be fair, the control group were offered the same lessons as the other children after the trial period was over.

Lessons ran for 36 weeks at a dedicated school in group sizes of around six pupils. All the children completed IQ tests in the summer break before they began their lessons and at the end of the study. Matched measures of age and socioeconomic status were taken.

After one year the vast majority of the children got better at the IQ test, which makes sense as they were a year older. However, the two music groups showed larger IQ improvements compared to the drama or control group. The IQ increase was small – equivalent to three or four IQ points – but it was there, and this effect was replicated in a similar study two years later.
¹³
In both studies the achievements on the IQ tests were mirrored in classroom performance.

Does this small difference in childhood IQ really mean anything, given the lack of a similar IQ difference between adult musicians and non-musicians?

On the positive side, it may be that a childhood boost in IQ helps or reflects development in other areas of the brain that may aid later mental function. For example, adult musicians show improved verbal learning and memory compared to similarly educated people with no musical training (more on this in Chapter 4). It could be that these early childhood IQ differences are an early marker of later adult differences in cognitive ability.

On the negative side, we are talking about three to four IQ points here for a year of lessons. Is that really worth writing home about? It’s interesting for psychologists but in a practical sense it doesn’t seem fair to put a child through a year of lessons for such a gain, especially if they aren’t enjoying themselves. And psychologists are not even convinced that music lessons actually
cause
IQ boosts. All that the above research establishes is that a relationship exists between music lessons and IQ, not that one leads to other. It does not rule out all possible other ‘hidden’ variables that might be driving the difference. And it may be that those children who are predisposed to higher IQ gains at younger ages are more likely to choose and/or respond well to music lessons.
¹⁴

After all that, maybe it’s not wise to treat IQ as the be all and end all of child development. There are other potential ‘transfer’ benefits from music lessons that, for my money, are more direct and more interesting. So let’s focus on them now.

Benefits of music lessons

Musical performance ability can be defined as a ‘super skill’ because it makes many varying demands on the mind and body. To achieve this ability requires long periods of concentrated attention and learning in areas such as auditory focus and direction, motor movement and coordination, pattern recognition and decoding (plus learning to read music in the first place), sensory integration, and emotional communication.
On top of that, a child must absorb the rules of musical styles, structures and cultural traditions of performance.

All told, learning how to play an instrument or perform with one’s voice is an extremely complicated business and because of this there is a list of related skills that may receive a boost along the way.

What follows is not an exhaustive list of the possible transfer benefits of music lessons; these are too wide-ranging to discuss in depth and often lack clear evidence. Instead I focus on two areas where a positive impact of music lessons on a child’s development has been reported and, importantly, replicated: hearing and listening, and language and reading.

Hearing and listening

The first benefit of music lessons, most obviously, is that children’s hearing skills tend to get better. This boost happens quickly and studies have reported effects of training on hearing within one year.
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This improvement in hearing skills has direct benefits for tests of musical ability
¹⁶
but can also extend into more general listening tasks. Here we will turn to the work of Nina Kraus.

Kraus runs an auditory neuroscience lab at Northwestern University, USA. Over the last few years her research group has conducted many studies of hearing skills in children who take music lessons. Her team believes that music lessons can help shape the brain for hearing tasks in ways that extend beyond the immediate demands of their musical education. Kraus refers to this concept as ‘music for a smarter ear’,
¹⁷
a phrase that sums up her lab’s findings rather nicely.